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Twin Atlantic Tour Diary: Sheffield

Twin Atlantic drummer Craig Kneale blogs from the road for Rock Sound.

Finally it was upon us - the moment we were all waiting for. A feeling we hadn’t experienced for over two months. Perhaps the greatest feeling of all...the Travelodge towel. As big as it is comfy, it encompasses your whole body like a giant duvet. A duvet that dries you. After being used to the napkin sized towels that mainland Europe seem to love that barely cover your genitals, this was like winning the lottery and then also finding out that you’d been picked by the public to become ‘King Of The Town’. Very nice.



We’d driven from Eindhoven after the final date of the European tour with Enter Shikari straight onto the ferry at Calais and indulged in some uncomfortable half sleep on the snakey shaped sofas. Arriving at Dover we stopped at the nearest T-Lodge (Gangster speak for Travelodge) for some rest and a romantic reunion with those sexy towels. Waking up perhaps four or five hours earlier than we really wanted to we traipsed back to the van and began the drive to Sheffield for the first date of our UK headline tour, dubbed ‘The Cool Guy’ tour by me because we’re all cool guys. I was pretty chuffed when I came up with that one. The drive actually turned out to be a smooth one, and we weren’t pulled over for having a van that was too orange or attacked by motorway tigers or anything.



We were playing the Sheffield Academy 2 which is a relatively new venue I think, although the floors were really sticky which suggest it’s been broken in fairly well by many a dropped Vodka Lemonade. The house vodka is Romanov - although you can upgrade to Smirnoff Red Label for an extra 20 pence, emm...just for your information. I like to know these things anyway. Support for the tour Canterbury had to pull out of this show as they had singer troubles He had been ordered by the Doctor’s of Rock to rest ‘dem vocal pipes.



The excellent Skeletons stepped in to bring the thunder instead - reducing some of the crowd to their literal bones such was the intensity of their tunez. We also lost a man due to skeletal trauma just before the show: Stevie Kneale, who had been with us for the last month as a stage tech and driver was ordered home today after finally going to the hospital to discover he had a fractured pelvic bone after a stage-dive-gone-badly wrong in Antwerp near the end of the Shikari tour.



Our numbers depleted and used to only playing for 30 minutes a night, we took to the stage slightly unprepared to play headline shows again. But it was a mild triumph in the face of, to be fair, not much adversity. It was a small but dedicated crowd, and we also figured out, with the aid of a scientist who we kidnapped from the local university, that it was a 2000% crowd increase from our last headline show in Sheffield a year and a bit ago. I suffered what can only be described as a THUMB DISASTER about 5 songs in - somehow managing to cut my nail down the middle with the edge of a cymbal. The result was a lot of blood but no tears because i’m so manly. We managed to hold it together and played all the songs we hadn’t played since before Christmas really well, I only flapped on the ones that we’ve been playing every night for the last month. But we got through it, and nobody died. So you’ve got to view that as a victory.

Afterwards we had a pretty horrible load out in the rain whilst trying to figure where to put the wall of new merch that had been delivered that day. Luckily, that scientist who we kidnapped earlier in the day came in useful again and he devised an equation that meant we could store all the merch in our minds. What a genius. We left soon after and headed to another T-Lodge with the promise of a full night’s sleep to look forward to.

All that was left for me to do when we got there was to give one of those sweet towels a passionate kiss and hold it tightly against me as I fell asleep. How I missed you, T-Lodge towel.